Many teenagers these days are not getting enough sleep. With stressful tests, never ending homework, and long days at work, sleep is usually at the bottom of the list. It almost makes one wonder how important sleep really is.

Sleep is a defined stage of unconsciousness from which a person can be aroused. Comas are often compared with sleeping, with a major difference being that in a comatic stage, one can not be aroused.

The normal sleeping process is broken into four stages. Stage one, or the light sleeping stage, is the first stage, and marks the transition between being awake, and going to sleep. During this stage, the muscles start to relax. Although this stage only makes up about five to ten percent of the total sleep cycle, an individual can be easily awaken during this stage.

Stage two makes up forty to fifty percent of the whole sleeping cycle. During this stage, eye movement ceases and the brain waves start to slow down.

Stage three and stage four are usually defined as deep sleep, where it is usually difficult to wake individuals in these stages. If someone is waken during these stages, they are often times groggy and disoriented for a few minutes until they adjust. These are also the stages that some children experience bedwetting, and many experience nightmares and sleep walking. Extremely slow brain waves appear called delta waves. The only difference between stage three and stage four are the actual percentage of delta waves produced.

REM, or rapid eye movement, usually follows the four sleeping cycles. REM accounts for twenty, to twenty-five percent of the total sleep cycle. During an eight hour sleeping night, we will have gone through the normal sleeping cycle and REM about four to five times. During REM, the eyeballs begin to move rapidly. The heart and breathing begin to become rapid and irregular, while the blood pressure rises. Also in REM, the body is virtually paralyzed, and often times dreaming begins to occur. So what exactly happens to ones body if sleep is deprived?

Well, after missing one night of sleep, one often experiences fatigue and attention span problems with the short-term memory. If two to three nights of sleep are missed, one will often suffer poor coordination, muscle twitches loss of concentration, impaired judgment, blurred vision, nausea, and slurred speech. One also usually goes through micro sleep, where one goes to sleep for a few seconds at a time, without even noticing it. After four to five days of missed sleep, one can expect extreme irritability, hallucinations, and delusional episodes. And by the sixth day, slowing in speech is recorded, along with extreme limb tremors, memory lapse, and trouble identifying one’s self, unusual behavior, and paranoia.

The effects of sleep deprivation more than eleven days have not been studied due to the health risks that go along with it. The longest recorded time spent without sleep goes went to a seventeen year old boy in 1965. He stayed awake for 264 hours, or 11 days. Along with the sleep he missed, he also suffered hallucinations and a gaunt of other symptoms. On the final day of his study, he feel asleep at a press conference, and awoke after fourteen hours and said he felt fine.

Sleep is important. Getting too little of it can prevent the brain from restoring itself. When there is a lack of sleep, there is a lack of white blood cells in the immune system. This is why when one is sick, the doctor often times says to go home and get lots of rest. The brain uses sleep as a time to sort, process, and catalogue all the information one has retained from being awake. When sleep is deprived, the brain must work harder to keep up, which means the brain does not have time for the things it normal does.

It is important to make sleeping one of your top priorities. If you have to, take time off work to make sure you get enough sleep. If you have a big test, don’t try to cram. Plan to study a little each day until the day of the test. You will get plenty of rest, and you will probably be more prepared for your test.

Get at least seven hours each night. That’s a seven hour investment towards the future.